Age of System

Succeeding his intellectual biography of Herbert A. Simon (Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America, 2005), Hunter Heyck seeks to identify a larger “movement toward a new social science” across a wide array of disciplines from the 1930s into the 1970s (p. 1). Describing this movement as “high modernism,” Heyck treats it as having the qualities of a human mind, possessing conceptions, perceptions, intentions, and methods, and as capable of thinking and acting (ibid.). The movement “conceived of all things in terms of organization, structure, system, function, and process” and possessed a “bureaucratic worldview” (p. 1). Heyck acknowledges that the high-modernism movement did not embrace all social science in the decades he examines, but he claims that it was the most significant element. The “method” of high-modern social science, he insists, was “to develop models that would enable one complex system, such as the digital computer, to simulate the behavior of another, such as the human mind” (ibid.). “The great foundations” (and, as Heyck has shown elsewhere, the better-endowed research universities) pushed the movement before the early 1950s; then federal military-, domestic-, and scientific-funding agencies intervened. As aspects of the “organizational revolution” these funders encouraged the application of “industrial modernity” to economic and military aims (p. 16

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